Fall 2020 and Welcome Week

Posted September 23, 2020 by William Crouch

It’s pretty crazy to think about how different the start to this fall semester is compared to last year. At this time last year, I was moving to Boston and now the whole world is somewhat frozen with the pandemic while Simmons is not having anything on campus this fall. But that hasn’t stopped us from trying to establish a community for our SLIS students as at the beginning of the month we had a series of digital welcome events for our new students. We had students talk with professors about the upcoming year, meeting with our Simmons librarians to help with research, a meeting for students to get to know each other and chat, and we even had a drawing for SLIS clothing at the end of the week. It was a lot of fun and if any incoming students are hesitant about attending these events the next time we have them, hopefully in person next fall, I would highly recommend going to help establish connections with professors and fellow students before your grad school career takes off. 

As for me, this semester I’m taking three courses, HIST 527 Collective Memory, LIS 440 Archival Access, and LIS 441 Appraisal. It will be really interesting to see how collective memory is changing with the events of the summer forcing us to confront the issues with mythologizing the heroes of our past as well as how our collective memory of monumental events like this upcoming election and the pandemic is created.. The archival classes will be ones that let me dig even deeper into the archival field and gain a deeper understanding of how these necessary functions of archival operate and are changing. The semester will certainly be an unusual one but I’m optimistic that it will be an ultimately fruitful and fun one to take in this historic year.